COUNTRY CHRONICLE

...Now it is a jar of "piccalilli" which is pressed into one's hand, now a jar of homemade pickles, submerged and green, now a jelly glass of our region's most delectable strawberry jam...

...Maine THE leaves are still on the trees, but once the light air of a sunny morning has risen with the returning warmth of earth, small breezes begin to stir in the boughs, and presently down comes the russet and the withered gold, the scarlet and the leather-brown, and a whole drift of maple leaves yellow as the sun...

...We see the aurora throughout the year—displays are by no means rare in midsummer—but to my mind there is sort of a vague auroral season here which begins in mid-September and trails off throughout our colder October...

...The other morning as I went to my own orchard I spied a bird in the fields seemingly as large as a small turkey...

...II I write this on my kitchen table at the very end of the morning, glad that my baskets of picked apples are in safe shelter in the shed...

...After the warmish, beautiful days have been coming the cold, frosty nights of our latitude, with the winter stars in the east and a splendor of the northern lights below the pole...

...I once tasted some in "the back kingdom" made from bear meat and thought that though the spices had done their best, there was still a flavor of the murmuring pines and the hemlocks...

...Sometimes the auroral glow gleams and pulses from the entire dome of the heavens...

...it is then we all step out of doors and stand watching in the farmyard...

...Man is a thing apart...

...Surely no other phenomenon of Nature confronts man with such a sense of mystery...

...There is only one thing which will save what is left of him as a human being, and that is a lebirth within him of wonder and reverence...

...As the day ripens in warmth and light we all gather our orchard apples, here dropping them gently from our hands into some modern container, here collecting them in some beautiful old basket bought from the Penobscot Indian basket-makers a good hundred years ago...

...Even so it was last night...

...When the cider mills get to turning, it will be jugs of HENRY BESTON, noted naturalist and author, has contributed much to The Progressive in recent years, especially his "Country Chronicle" columns subsequent' ly published in book form...

...The visitor was a large red-shouldered hawk, and as I watched him quietly he gleaned the pale grass for grasshoppers and crickets, now making short runs, now pouncing with a hop, quite like a gigantic robin...

...The hearth fire has been burning now close upon a fortnight, and we feed it with birch logs which have a country beauty of their own when ridged with the movement of flame and seen against the blackened chimney throat...

...Lawrence" for the Rivers of America Series...

...My newspaper will soon be in hand, and I shall presently read that they are trying to build the good life with flame throwers, guns, bombs, and all manner of the most terrible non-human machine cruelty...

...at other times it is but a great arch of strangest phosphorescent glowing standing above the horizon and the pitch dark forest to the north, its highest point just about half-way between Polaris and the earth...

...A former edi-tor of The Atlantic Monthly and The Living Age, he is the author of many books, including "Full Speed Ahead,'' "Starlight Wonder Book," "The Outermost House," "The Book of Gallant Vagabonds," "Herbs and The Earth," and "The St...

...Let them realize that the soul of man cannot be saved by new or old political institutions...

...There was something very fierce about this fellow with his hooked beak, and wild, bird-of-prey head...

...cider which will go visiting, hanging from the knuckle of somebody's right hand forefinger...

...it was like seeing an eagle by the door...

...Again, it may be a bag of some farm's notable and nameless apples —"nobody knows where grandfather got that tree"—or a pint jar of cranberry relish...

...Wandering out of doors restlessly at midnight, I heard nothing, and could see nothing in the darkness but such a vast wheel rim of beautiful pale fire, cold as ice itself and flowering from its rim with greenish glowings and sweeping radiances of light...

...It is the pleasant season when the farms honor their humanity and make each other small neighborly presents gf good things...

...Though I had not frightened him up as I went to the orchard, my later-arriving helper must have done so, for chancing to remember the bird a half hour later as I was working with the apples, I looked out from among the leaves and saw that he was gone...

...Field work is about over, and now comes the harvesting...

...Homemade mincemeat comes later, and in this hunting country, it is the custom to make the mincemeat from the neck meat of a deer...

...The wind is north northwest, and the wood smoke from the kitchen chimney blows off high above the ridgepole and vanishes at once into the brilliant, the living air...

...We are fond of cider here...

...It is October, and though the eastern sun is about to turn the fated corner of the house, there is still early morning sunshine in the farm kitchen, and the fire on the hearth, the sunlight and the quiet all mingle together in a sense of peace which is at the same time haunted with a rustic premonition of coming change...